Gradle Copy files and expand only some of them and/or ignore dollar signs in others

Question

I have a tree of files that I'd like to copy with Gradle, and for some of the files (e.g. ending in .txt), I'd like to do some property substitions. For example, I have:

task "copyAndroidAssets$flavor" (type: Copy, 
   dependsOn: ["cleanAndroidAssets", "copyAndroidRes$flavor"] ) {
   from "build/assets/${flavorLc}/release/"
   into '../android/assets'
   expand ( versionName: myVersionName, versionCode: myVersionCode )
}

The problem is that some of the files in the tree being copied have dollar signs ($) in them that have nothing to do with property expansion, and this creates the error SimpleTemplateScript6.groovy: 1: illegal string body character after dollar sign;.

In my specific scenario, all the files except one can simply be copied as is. Only a single file, about.txt, needs to have values substituted. Any suggestions on a simple way to do this?

Answer 1

Now (Gradle 2.3.1) there is a better solution: https://issues.gradle.org/browse/GRADLE-1566

processResources {
    inputs.property('version', version)
    filesMatching("**/version.properties") {
        expand version: version
    } }

In my case I want project properties expansion only in yaml files:

processResources {
    filesMatching("**/*.yaml") {
        expand project.properties
    }
}

Answer 2

Thanks to the link from Opal in the comments, I found a solution. The link shows that it is possible to have multiple from sources and each of these can have a separate expand treatment. Thus, in my case, I only wanted to expand .txt files, so I split the from into two parts using include & exclude as follows:

task "copyAndroidAssets$flavor" (type: Copy, 
    dependsOn: ["cleanAndroidAssets", "copyAndroidRes$flavor"] ) {
    from ("build/assets/${flavorLc}/release/") {
        include '**/*.txt'
        expand ( versionName: versionName, versionCode: versionCode )
    }
    from ("build/assets/${flavorLc}/release/") {
        exclude '**/*.txt'
    }
    into '../android/assets'
    expand ( versionName: myVersionName, versionCode: myVersionCode )
}